In March 2020, my job disappeared and my library school classes went online. I was suddenly at a loose end, studying and participating in class but not commuting an hour each way to get to it. I couldn’t get library work experience during this time, but I did carry out a steady stream of tasks that felt to me like reference work.
My friend needed to donate an old laptop that was running Windows 7 and Explorer. Windows 7 doesn’t support Internet Explorer, and Windows 7 is no longer supported. She needed to update the operating system but couldn’t access the internet in order to do so, and didn’t know if she would have to pay to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10. After some research, I discovered that she could use a flash drive to install a supported browser on the old computer and found a download link for Windows 10 that wouldn’t require her to pay anything.
I made a video tutorial for the seniors in my mother’s friend’s neighborhood, showing how to get a grocery pickup slot at the store and navigate a website with some counterintuitive functions. I had first made a text-based tutorial with screenshots, but realized that a video was a better format, given the tasks I wanted to demonstrate. I had learned how to make video tutorials in my user instruction class, and the grocery store video seemed to record itself. I kept the finer points of faceted search techniques out of the tutorial, but I did show how a user could find things by searching terms that wouldn’t show up in the faceted browse interface. I uploaded the video to youtube and was thrilled to hear that it was on Nextdoor and people were interacting with it.
My mother’s other friend couldn’t figure out how to connect her hearing aids to her laptop and phone, and I made a text tutorial explaining how. One of the interesting aspects of this task was that my mother’s friend didn’t understand how Bluetooth worked, and my mother, who is very tech savvy, explained her impression of the friend’s understanding of it. I realized that I knew what Bluetooth could do but not how it actually worked, and looking that up was fascinating. One thing I appreciate about library work is that it introduces me to interesting topics I didn’t know existed or that it would never occur to me to research in my everyday life.
My father thought that his favorite coffee cups had been discontinued at Ikea and he only had two of them left. I browsed the Ikea website carefully and eventually found the cups. In this case, faceted browse was a more powerful tool than the search bar.
My mother’s ancient KitchenAid, a model that hasn’t been produced for twenty years, needed a new flat beater. I learned that “flat beater” was the correct term after mistakenly searching with the word “paddle” and ending up in mysterious corners of the cooking equipment internet. KitchenAid mixers can all use the same attachments, several blogs informed me. I was briefly thrilled, but it turned out that in this context the word “attachment” only refers to things like pasta rollers that can be screwed into the front of the mixer. After almost an hour of research, I ascertained that the key metrics for the beater and whip attachments are the size of the mixer bowl and whether the mixer has a tilt head or bowl lift design.
My younger brother wanted to write a cover letter for an internship application and didn’t know where to start. He asked me for help and I directed him to the Wellesley College Career Education page. Many of their resources are open to the public and I knew that their guidelines and templates would help my brother, even though he’s in high school.
I also helped my brother narrow down his college list, researching questions like “what’s the difference between College X and College Y?” Once you know what you want in terms of size and type, the list of colleges that meet a very specific set of criteria can still be overwhelming. This was one of the hardest tasks I worked on in this period, because the differences between schools boil down to campus culture, values, and social life. These things are subjective, vary according to how each student experiences the school, and are largely obscured from the internet. Without access to student forums like class Facebook pages or events calendars, it was difficult to distinguish one institution from another. Admissions materials are a sort of research red herring and reading them critically is draining. Determining what’s just marketing, what’s in the copy specifically to counteract a school’s prevailing reputation for something, and what truly reflects the climate of the school would exhaust anyone. My brother and I worked together and succeeded in narrowing down his list from 34 schools to 20 as his college counselor had asked.
Although these tasks weren’t at all like the most recent official reference tasks I had done, they kept me in the librarian mindset even when I wasn’t in a library. I took great satisfaction from these short research projects and the wide range of topics they covered.
0 Comments